New moves to extradite death camp guard 'Ivan'

A FORMER guard at a Nazi death camp could finally be brought to justice 20 years after standing trial accused of being an SS man who earned the nickname Ivan the Terrible.

Germany's chief war crimes investigator today said he had asked prosecutors to extradite John Demjanjuk from the United States and charge him with involvement in the murder of 29,000 Jews.

Kurt Schrimm said his office had new evidence that Demjanjuk, 88, had been a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland and had personally led Jews to the gas chambers there in 1943. Ukraine-born Demjanjuk, now living in Ohio, was sentenced to death in 1988 after Holocaust survivors identified him as a guard at Treblinka. But the Israeli supreme court overturned his conviction when it learned that another man was probably the notorious "Ivan" at Treblinka.

He returned to his home near Cleveland in 1993 and the United States restored his citizenship in 1998. Mr Schrimm said the new move by Germany follows the discovery of documents and several witnesses naming Demjanjuk as a guard at Sobibor.